Environmental History Quotes

A dam tears at all the interconnected webs of river valley life.

Patrick McCully

In the 1940s dams were synonymous with progress, and the rivers were to be conquered with the fervour of a pioneer wielding an axe.

Contemporary attitudes toward urban parks fall into three levels of sophistication. The first, the most naive assumption, is that parks are just plots of land preserved in their original state. If asked to discuss the issue at all, many laymen have maintained this much, that parks are bits of nature created only in the sense that some decision was made not to build on the land. Many are surprised to learn that parks that an artifact conceived and deliberated as carefully as public buildings, with both physical shape and social usage taken into account. The second, a little more informed, is that parks are aesthetic objects and that their history can be understood in terms of an evolution of artistic styles independent of societal considerations. The third is the view that each of the elements of the urban park represents part of planners' strategy for moral and social reform, so that today, as in the past, the citizen visiting a park is subject to an accumulated set of intended moral lessons.

We must experience Heaven on earth;May your homes, surroundings and work places portray a safe clean environment.

Lailah Gifty Akita

In fact, the advocates of People's Park had asserted another version of what is probably America's oldest and most cherished fantasy: a daily reality of harmony between man and nature based on an experience of the land land as essentially feminine - that is not simply the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of gratification - enclosing the individual in an environment of receptivity, repose, and painless and integral satisfaction.

Annette Kolodny

I have every expectation that cancer will become known as the disease of human evolution trying and failing to adapt to a significantly changed environment.